William Bede Dalley: Silver-tongued pride of old Sydney

By Robert Lehane

When Dalley, a convict's son who became the first Australian Privy Councillor, died in 1888, The Bulletin described him as 'a man of many splendours, both of intellect and heart', and 'in many respects the most notable man Sydney has given birth to'. Nine years later some 10,000 people gathered in Hyde Park for the u

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Oct 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781760412289

Book preview

Chapter One

Looking up

The year William Dalley was born, 1831, was a propitious one for New South Wales. The reformist Governor Richard Bourke replaced the autocratic Ralph Darling at the end of the year, an important event in its transition from remote British gaol to flourishing self-governing colony. Some of his proposals, including a mainly elected Legislative Council and a broad-based public education system, were blocked. But his six years in charge saw big advances in areas such as the fair administration of justice, press freedom and religious equality. Assisted immigration began in 1832 and grew rapidly in the second half of the decade. Numbers of convicts arriving increased too – up to 1840 when transportation ended – but as the population grew, from about 50,000 in 1831 to nearly 100,000 in 1838, the ratio of free to convict rose rapidly. And the economy boomed; revenue nearly trebled and exports more than doubled during Bourke’s term.¹

The Governor’s work was appreciated – so much so that donations flooded in when admiring colonists proposed that a bronze statue be cast in England and erected in Sydney in his honour. Among the larger contributors was John Dalley, father of William; he gave £10 to the initial collection and more subsequently.² By early 1840 takings exceeded the £2,400 contracted cost, and the imposing statue, which stands outside the Mitchell Library, was unveiled in 1842. Dalley senior’s donations are a sign that he doing very nicely in the colony.

His prospects had looked decidedly bleak two decades earlier when, in March 1818, at the age of 18, he was brought before the Dorset, southern England, assizes charged with burglary. The court found him guilty and he heard the death sentence pronounced – often the fate of minor criminals in those days. Fortunately, it was also common practice for the ultimate sentence to be commuted to transportation for life, and Dalley was among those spared. He arrived in Sydney on the General Stuart with about 250 fellow convicts on 31 December 1818 and was assigned to Francis Oakes of Parramatta, one of the district’s earliest settlers and reputedly an ‘honest, steady citizen’. Oakes engaged in farming, various business enterprises, and government work; his positions included chief constable for the Parramatta district.³ How he employed Dalley is not recorded; the convict records give the young man’s trade as ‘wool comber and dyer’, work that Oakes is not likely to have required of him. They also tell us that he was a Protestant, five feet eight inches tall, with a fair and ruddy complexion, brown hair and hazel eyes.

Dalley was reassigned during the 1820s to John Street of ‘Woodlands’, near Bathurst. This forebear of three chief justices of New South Wales⁴ had immigrated to the colony in 1822 bringing merino sheep from the Henty flock in Sussex. (The Hentys, pioneers of the Western District of Victoria, came out later.) With other pastoralists, he founded the Bathurst Hunt Club in 1825 and drew up a set of rules that prescribed, among other things, a livery of scarlet frock coat with black velvet facings, buff waistcoat, white breeches and top boots for the hunt.⁵ The colony’s 1828 census reveals that he employed the 30-year-old Dalley as a footman – ‘a male servant in livery who attends the door or the carriage, waits at table, etc’⁶ – suggesting he sought to reproduce English country life in his home as well as in gentlemanly sport.

Also working for Street in 1828 was Catherine Dobbins (née Spillane), an Irish convict probably in her mid-20s.⁷ She had arrived in Sydney on the Mariner in July 1825, having been found guilty at the Cork City assizes in April 1824 of stealing shirts and sentenced to seven years’ transportation. Her four-year-old daughter, also Catherine, came out with her, and was placed in the Parramatta orphanage on arrival. The census records that Street employed the young mother – described as four feet 11¼ inches tall, brown complexion, black hair, hazel eyes, quiet disposition, Roman Catholic – as a nurse.

At the end of 1828, 10 years after arriving in the colony, John Dalley was granted his ticket-of-leave, the first step towards emancipation. Catherine received hers the following August. Less than three weeks later the pair applied, as they had to under the convict regulations, for permission to marry. This was initially refused on the ground that Catherine was already married, but the problem was somehow sorted out. Rev. John Therry, the colony’s sole Catholic priest at the time looking after an exceedingly scattered flock of perhaps 15,000,⁸ married John and Catherine on 12 July 1830 – John having converted to his wife’s faith.⁹

The couple’s first child, another John, had been born a year earlier.¹⁰ William was second, born in the winter of 1831,¹¹ probably at the Dalleys’ newly acquired premises in George Street North, Sydney, where John ran a clothing store. This was just back from the western shore of Sydney Cove, opposite the government stores.¹² Catherine had double cause to celebrate; the previous April she had become a free woman on the expiration of her sentence. After William’s birth she wasted little time in lodging a petition for the return of her daughter, now aged about 10, from the orphanage. Dated 21 September 1831, this pointed out that she was now free and able to provide for and protect her child. The petition was successful, and young Catherine became and remained a close member of the family.¹³

Catherine senior bore five more children over the next 11 years. Only two of them survived to adulthood – Christina, born in 1839, and Richard, in 1842. James Dalley died at 14 months in 1836, another James shortly after his birth two years later, and Hannah at two years and four months in 1839. Not only infants were lost; the first-born, John, was a year ahead of William at school and, like him, an outstanding student when he died at the age of 15½ in January 1845.¹⁴ Death was a frequent visitor to the Dalley household during William’s childhood and youth.

As the family came along, the father progressed along the road to full citizen’s rights. His conditional pardon – free, but required to remain in the colony – was granted in February 1833 and in June 1838 the office of the Principal Superintendent of Convicts advised that his absolute pardon was ready to collect.¹⁵

In the meantime, he was growing wealthy through property investments. Newspaper announcements provide glimpses of his activities. For example, in 1836 he paid £13 an acre for a little over five acres of undeveloped land on Sydney’s outskirts; five years later he outlaid a much more hefty £1,750 on inner-city premises in George Street.¹⁶ Advertisements offering rooms, houses and business premises to rent appeared frequently in the press over his name.¹⁷ Having, apparently, come through the recession of the early 1840s unscathed, he advertised in 1844 that he had money to lend – from £1,000 to £2,000 – on freehold city property for periods of not less than two years.¹⁸ His will, prepared in 1867, listed 17 properties in his name – mostly houses in Sydney but including a half-acre allotment at Kiama on the south coast.

Growing up in Sydney’s docklands in the 1830s and ’40s would have offered much stimulation to a child of William Dalley’s imagination and intelligence. There was the constant coming and going of ships and characters of all sorts, linking Sydney with ‘home’ on the other side of the world, and with the Pacific islands and settlements up and down the coast. Convict chain gangs and their military escorts remained a frequent sight in the streets. Sydney gaol was situated just blocks south of the Dalley home in George Street, its gallows visible above the walls. Executions there were public events. The sadly depleted Aboriginal population was a reminder to those who cared to notice that British settlement, however prosperous, had come at a cost.

Admiring contemporaries have provided a few glimpses of William as a child. ‘We were boys together and played on the green together,’ recalled Sir George Dibbs – a colleague in the Stuart government of 1883–85 and later Premier – at the unveiling of the Dalley statue in 1897. ‘Then, as afterwards at the Bar and in political life, Dalley was the idol of all… He was…full of fun and anecdote, always bright and happy.’¹⁹ Another old friend, the lawyer Alexander Oliver, recalled forming a life-long friendship with Dalley at ‘Old Taylor’s’ Fort Street school. He said Dalley gave Taylor, ‘a good pedagogue’, more to do than most of the other boys, ‘being singularly averse from anything like rigid discipline’.

At that time young Dalley’s parents lived in Fort-street, and young Dalley, with some of his contemporaries, used to make the Flagstaff district lively for the inhabitants. I am afraid, if the truth has to be told, that this deponent was not often missing from the roll-call when war was waged against the boys of a neighbouring school. The Hill boys were generally victorious, and their leaders, as a matter of course, generally in trouble.²⁰

Then there is the tale of Dalley playing marbles with Frank Christie, later the bushranger Gardiner. A Captain Charles, neighbour of the Dalleys in George Street North, is quoted as recalling seeing ‘a pleasant, fair-haired boy’ and ‘a bright, round-headed youngster’ shooting marbles on the road.

I accidentally scuffed one of the marbles, and recollect quite well putting my hand on the fair-haired boy’s head and asking him not to be vexed. He looked up and smiled, and said it was alright. He grew up to be the dark-visaged and notorious bushranger Frank Gardiner; the other boy was none other than the distinguished statesman William Bede Dalley.

This story could be true; Christie (Gardiner), aged five, arrived in Sydney with his Scottish family in November 1834. He was about two years older than Dalley. One teller of the tale, C.H. Bertie, notes that ‘in the eternal fitness of things Dalley defended Gardiner at the latter’s trial in May, 1864.’²¹

J.P. McGuanne provides glimpses of a slightly older Dalley, when he was a student at Sydney College and then St Mary’s Seminary. ‘Ever ready for fun, yet mindful of study, he induced during youth many long friendships. His pony, with a blue ribbon round its neck on prize days, would carry him skittishly to school, and race all-comers on the way home.’ McGuanne added, presumably referring to his move to the Seminary, that when Dalley parted from ‘his brother collegians’ he quoted the lines:

Sharers of our glorious past,

Brothers, must we part at last?

Shall not we thro’ good and ill

Cleave to one another still?²²

Not yet eight years old, William Dalley entered Sydney College at the beginning of 1839, a year after his brother John. One classmate remembered him as ‘ever bright, ever genial, ever and everywhere the favourite, his sunny face and cheerful talk and happy disposition…were indications of what the lad would be when arrived at man’s estate’.²³

This school, and particularly its first headmaster, William T. Cape, educated many of the colony’s notable men. Dalley was one of more than 50 former pupils who gathered in June 1871 for a dinner to commemorate Cape, who had died in 1863. The purpose, in Dalley’s words, was to ‘honour the memory of a dead schoolmaster, to confess our obligations to his learning and fidelity, and to revive our recollections of those days when we were ourselves humble students’. The Premier and later Chief Justice, Sir James Martin, chaired proceedings and gave the main speech. Another speaker was John Robertson, five times Premier of NSW and one of Cape’s first pupils at a school he began in King Street in 1829, six years before Sydney College opened. William Forster, Premier for a brief term in 1859–60, also spoke; his claim to have been ‘a bit of a favourite’ with Cape brought cries of ‘hear, hear’. Forster remembered him as a man whose love of young people made him ‘so excellent a teacher’. ‘He knew every boy individually, and applied to him individually the peculiar talents he possessed. They always felt that they were under his eye…’²⁴

The writer Rolf Boldrewood (real name T.A. Browne), having just been appointed police magistrate on the new Gulgong goldfield, missed the dinner. Like Dalley, he encountered Cape at Sydney College (later reincarnated as Sydney Grammar School). In an article published in 1898, he recalled cricket games in Hyde Park, learning to swim under Cape’s supervision in Woolloomooloo Bay, and a ‘wild romantic waste’ as playground behind the school. Cape was a ‘strict, occasionally severe, but invariably just and impartial ruler’, Boldrewood wrote. External examiners visited twice a year to check on the students’ progress; he particularly remembered one of them – the Catholic Bishop John Bede Polding, a ‘gentle, dignified personage, revered by all’.²⁵

polding

Archbishop Polding

All the Dalley children were baptised into the Catholic church, and Polding confirmed 12-year-old William at St Mary’s Cathedral in August 1843; that is when he acquired the middle name Bede. Polding was only months back in the colony after an absence of nearly two and a half years on church business in England, Ireland and Rome, during which he was promoted to Archbishop. This English Benedictine missioner had taken charge of the church in Sydney in 1835, at the age of 40. In 1838 he established St Mary’s Seminary, which he hoped would produce ‘a native race of priests and statesmen, of lawyers and physicians, of soldiers, sailors and artists’.²⁶ As well as training candidates for the priesthood, it offered Catholic youths whose parents were willing and able to pay the modest fees the type of classical and commercial education offered by Sydney College.

The seminary got off to a slow start. ‘The Catholics of the town do not send their children,’ Polding wrote regretfully in May 1839. ‘I want someone who will go amongst them and expostulate with their neglect.’²⁷ Cape’s reputation provided a good reason for parents like the Dalleys to prefer the non-denominational Sydney College for their children’s education. However, Cape departed in 1841, and the Dalley boys moved to the seminary around that time. Reports in the Catholic newspaper, The Chronicle, of end-of-year award ceremonies show that both John and William made their mark there.

With Polding overseas, the Vicar-General, Very Rev. Francis Murphy, presided in 1841 and 1842. In 1841 he heard young John Dalley deliver a speech ‘with great good taste and correctness’, and presented him with a prize for arithmetic; the following year he heard one of the boys (initial not given) perform in a ‘parliamentary’ debate. William started to shine in 1843, when Polding was back to present the awards. He came second in the school in elocution and took a prize for ‘globes’, while his brother excelled in English grammar, catechism and geometry. After the presentations, John chaired and William spoke in a debate, ‘conducted with much spirit and ingenuity’, on the character of Julius Caesar.

Only William appears in the awards list for 1844; probably John was already stricken with the illness that took his life early the following year.²⁸ As well as winning a prize for elocution, William excelled in Latin, English composition, bookkeeping and writing. For 1845, his last year at the seminary, he is listed among the top students in Latin, French, English, history, geography, mathematics and Christian doctrine. The 14-year-old carried away two prizes – ‘first honour’ in arithmetic and bookkeeping, and, as one would expect from his subsequent career, in elocution.²⁹

Information about his life in the years immediately after school is scarce. He is said to have had a clerical job with the Burdekin family business for a time. This was established by the merchant Thomas Burdekin, who arrived from England in 1828, acquired much real estate in Sydney and other parts of the colony and died in 1844. The name lives on in Queensland’s Burdekin River; the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt crossed it in April 1845 and named it in honour of Thomas’s widow, Mary Ann, who had assisted the expedition.³⁰

At some point William began his legal studies articled to a prominent Sydney solicitor, Frederick Wright Unwin. What further assistance he received in his preparations for the Bar after Unwin’s death in October 1852 is unknown. According to a biographical note published in 1856, he spent nearly three years in the solicitor’s office, and then for the next two years was ‘incapacitated from pursuing any regular employment by ill-health’. During this time ‘he appears to have been more or less a student, mastering Greek under his own direction, and qualifying himself in other branches of learning…’³¹ In July 1856 he satisfied the examiners that he had a sufficient mastery of Greek, Latin and mathematics, as well as the law, to warrant admission to practise as a barrister.

The family maintained close connections with the church. Polding reported in July 1844 that John Dalley (senior) was a trustee of the debt-burdened St Patrick’s Church in the city, and intended to place the deeds of his property, worth at least £4,000, in the bank as security for it.³² In July 1846, 15-year-old William – doubtless the most literate member of the household – wrote to Father Therry in Hobart with the latest news. Most of the letter is about the sad drowning of a priest, Rev. Dunphy, in a river near Mudgee:

He was compelled by duty to cross the river (on horseback), it being in a flooded state, when about half across the river the undertow threw the horse down, and as the Rev. gentleman could not disengage himself, he was drowned. A shepherd on the opposite bank saw the whole of the fatal accident but could not render the least assistance. High Mass was offered up in St Mary’s Church for him on Tuesday 29th inst by His Grace the Archbishop, assisted by Right Rev. Dr Epaille, Vicar Apostolic of Western Oceania.

Other news was the Archbishop’s dedication of a church at Parramatta and the dangerous illnesses of a priest and another man. ‘We are all well,’ he noted. William wrote to Therry again a year later to advise that the family would take care of some luggage of his. He added, ‘The packet ship has just arrived bringing intelligence of the death of O’Connell.’ Clearly he knew there was no need to elaborate in reporting the death of the renowned ‘Liberator’ of Ireland’s Catholics to the veteran Irish priest.³³

In August 1851, Dalley father and son spoke at a ‘very numerous and respectable’ public meeting at St Mary’s Seminary called to begin fund-raising for extensions to the cathedral. John moved a motion and William seconded another one.³⁴ Possibly this was his first post-school public speech. What he said was not reported.

William followed his father in becoming involved in politics. John Dalley seconded the nomination of a colonial-born Catholic businessman, Daniel Egan, as a candidate in Sydney’s first municipal council elections in October 1842. The following December he was listed as a supporter of William Charles Wentworth and Dr William Bland as candidates in the first Legislative Council elections. Six years earlier he had been among donors to the Australian Patriotic Association, formed by Wentworth, Bland and others to agitate for a version of self-government that did not discriminate against ex-convicts. At the municipal elections of November 1844 he stood unsuccessfully as a candidate. Despite pledging ‘to do all that lies in my power to prevent heavy taxation’, he secured only forty-two of the 564 votes cast in his ward.³⁵

Probably the person with the biggest early formative influence on young Dalley, aside from parents, teachers and priests, was a near contemporary, Daniel Henry Deniehy. Three years Dalley’s senior, the precocious Deniehy was also the son of ex-convicts. Recognising the genius of their only child, the parents took him to England, Ireland and Europe in 1843, at the age of 14, to further his education. After returning the following year he was articled to the solicitor and literary patron N.D. Stenhouse, and enjoyed the older man’s friendship and support as he developed his literary interests as well as his legal skills. He was admitted as a solicitor in May 1851, and four months later delivered a series of lectures on poetry at the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts. More lectures followed in subsequent years, including a series on modern French literature. He began submitting literary criticism to newspapers in the late 1840s.³⁶

The journalist David Blair, who met Deniehy in 1851, left a vivid description of the then 22-year-old:

He was certainly the smallest and most compact little gentleman of his years I had ever met with up till that time. He was clad in the style of a finished man of fashion – in fact, a perfect little dandy. His eyes were peculiar from extreme short-sightedness, and he wore a ‘quizzing-glass,’ as the single eye-glass was then popularly designated. His manners were those of a born gentleman; his laugh was clear and ringing; his spoken English, like his written English, was perfect; and he was fairly overflowing with wit, learning, and vivacity.³⁷

Blair wrote that he had many rambles and discursive talks with his ‘sworn friend’ Deniehy before leaving Sydney a few months later. He noted elsewhere that he never met Dalley,³⁸ which perhaps indicates that the Dalley/Deniehy friendship had not yet been forged. Whenever it began, there is no doubt about its strength. Deniehy described Dalley as his bosom friend and companion – their connection was like that of Damon and Phythias of classical myth or Chaucer’s Palamon and Arcite.³⁹ Dalley recalled in 1882 that it had been his ‘inestimable privilege’ to enjoy Deniehy’s ‘most intimate friendship’ for years – ‘to hang for hours upon the music of a speech which to my ears at all events has never fallen from the lips of any other man’.⁴⁰

Probably Deniehy introduced Dalley into the Stenhouse literary circle, which included writers such as the poets Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall and the University of Sydney’s principal and classics professor John Woolley. He may also have influenced Dalley’s personal style; like Deniehy, Dalley was something of a dandy, although a more robust and handsome figure. He is said to have invariably greeted friends and acquaintances as ‘old boy’, ‘old man’ or ‘old fellow’. An admiring observer of one of his court performances in the late 1860s wrote, ‘It was a charming sight to see this dapper little barrister, with his well-cut coat and white waistcoat, stand up to deliver his harangue, with his hat, lavender kid gloves, and cane before him.’⁴¹ Another writer remembered Dalley in the 1870s as ‘always plump and jolly, in his dark buttoned-up frock coat, with a flower in his button-hole, his silk hat a little on one side’.⁴²

Dalley watched Deniehy win renown as an orator in the early 1850s; his turn came later. Newly married and apparently doing well at the law, Deniehy addressed a large public meeting called in June 1852 to condemn proposals to resume convict transportation to NSW. ‘The great cloud of caste’ which ‘once brooded black and thunderous over the brightest moral and social seasons of the land’ had passed away, he declared. ‘It would be the devilish act of the oppressors…to set it again afloat on the horizon darkening over generations yet unborn.’⁴³ The sentiments were similar when he joined the outcry the following year against Wentworth’s proposal for a hereditary colonial peerage as part of the colony’s new self-government constitution. At a packed meeting in Sydney’s Victoria Theatre he coined the phrase ‘bunyip aristocracy’ to ridicule the proposal, and urged that the colony become ‘a land where…the law no more recognises the supremacy of a class than it recognises the predominance of a religion’. There was an aristocracy ‘worthy of our ambition’, he said to great cheering:

Wherever man’s skill is eminent, wherever glorious manhood asserts its elevation, there is an aristocracy that confers honour on the land that possesses it. That is God’s aristocracy. That is an aristocracy that will grow and expand under free institutions, and bless the land where it flourishes.⁴⁴

Three weeks later Deniehy told a large outdoor gathering at Circular Quay that ‘unjust and despotic class legislation’ characterised every institution in Britain.⁴⁵ He moved to Goulburn the following year in the hope, which was not fulfilled, of benefiting his health and legal practice. Over the next two years he set out his vision for an Australian democratic republic in a long series of articles in the Goulburn Herald.⁴⁶

Deniehy was the organisers’ first choice to respond to the toast to ‘our native land’ at a gala public banquet held at Sydney’s Prince of Wales Theatre on 11 March 1856 to honour Charles Gavan Duffy, who had recently arrived to settle in Australia. The 39-year-old Duffy, a prominent member of the nationalist Young Ireland movement, had narrowly escaped conviction for treason in 1848. He became a leading politician in Victoria, including serving a term as Premier, after rejecting overtures to settle in New South Wales.

Deniehy could not get to the banquet and the 24-year-old Dalley was invited to take his place. He joined a speakers’ list that included Henry Parkes, rising English-born politician and proprietor of the liberal Empire newspaper, and the barrister Edward Butler, who had been an associate of Duffy in Ireland. Dalley praised Deniehy as one of the colony’s ‘most illustrious’ men. And he praised Duffy, saying his presence at the banquet had brought all classes together in harmony. He hoped ‘all such paltry distinctions as had in former times been made would be by this event extinguished forever’, and that all would now accept the ‘utter falsity’ of the idea that the circumstances of a man’s birth might be ‘disparaging to his success’.⁴⁷

The speech was brief, and makes rather pedestrian reading. Nevertheless, Dalley’s debut as an after-dinner speaker seems to have gone down very well, presumably because of the manner of delivery. According to a writer for the Empire, Duffy afterwards expressed ‘a high opinion and a high hope’ of the young man. He reportedly said on more than one occasion, ‘If I were to stay with you [in New South Wales], I should bring out that young Australian – depend upon it, there is stuff in him!’⁴⁸

Chapter Two

Into the fray

The day after the banquet, voting began in the first elections for the New South Wales Legislative Assembly; responsible government had arrived. Not all were satisfied with the new arrangements. Some feared democracy had already advanced too far, threatening property and good order in the colony. Many of a more liberal bent disapproved of, among other things, the property or income qualification for voters,¹ the fact that country electorates would return disproportionately large numbers of members, and the non-elected Legislative Council. Duffy, fighter for radical change in Ireland, counselled acceptance in his banquet speech:

With all its faults, I believe you have one of the safest, wisest, and most liberal constitutions in the world. I would rather live under it for the immediate present which it opens, and the certain future which it prepares, than under any system I am acquainted with on either side of the Atlantic.²

The key advance was that, instead of being chosen by and answerable to the Governor, appointed by the British government, ministers would be drawn from the legislature and hold office for as long as they retained the support of the elected assembly. Responsible government was introduced in Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia about the same time. The New South Wales Governor, Sir William Denison, noted in a despatch to London, ‘My position, as, indeed, that of all the Governors of these colonies, is peculiar; we cease to be persons in authority…’³ His wife professed amusement, noting in her journal that ‘all the Australian colonies are in the process of receiving new constitutions, and are to have Parliaments of their own! and responsible ministers!!’⁴

cowper

Charles Cowper

After the protracted elections – voting took place in different constituencies on different days with the whole process lasting nearly six weeks – parliament was opened with much ceremony on 22 May. A 43-year-old merchant and landowner, Stuart Donaldson, headed the first, ‘conservative’, government. It lasted three and a half months before giving way to a ‘liberal’ group led by 49-year-old Charles Cowper, a leading player in the colony’s politics since the first Legislative Council elections in 1843. Cowper’s government held office for just over a month; then the ‘conservatives’ returned, now led by a 48-year-old businessman, Henry Parker, who had come to the colony as private secretary to Governor Sir George Gipps in 1838. His government lasted 11 months.

The terms conservative and liberal were used at the time and provide a good indication of the broad attitudes of the political players. However, the division was not sharp enough to lead to the formation of anything resembling cohesive parties that could provide stable government.⁵ Denison expressed his frustration with the situation when he reported the fall of the Donaldson government to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Henry Labouchere, in August 1856.

I told you in my June letter that there can hardly be said to be any political parties in these colonies; everybody differs in opinion from his neighbour on some question or another, and is not disposed to sacrifice his opinion for party purposes. The spirit of individuality is so strong amongst people here, that they can with difficulty be persuaded to combine for any social purpose, and therefore can hardly be expected to do so for political objects.⁶

His frustration turned to anger when Cowper’s government was toppled a month later. ‘The main difficulty,’ he told Labouchere, ‘is not the absence of qualified [men] but the presence of a multiplicity of men who conceive themselves thoroughly qualified to direct the affairs of a great nation, to say nothing of those of a colony… Responsibility is, in fact, a name, a clap-trap, a watch-word devised by the unscrupulous as a means of deluding the unwary, meaning nothing but the right of the majority to make fools of themselves without let or hindrance.’⁷

If Dalley involved himself in the first elections, it was not in a prominent role. Instead, starting in April 1856, he contributed his oratorical skills to efforts to raise the funds needed to enable Duffy to meet the property qualification for election to Victoria’s new Legislative Assembly. The funds flowed in, and the Irishman was duly elected in November 1856. ‘Equality, freedom and their natural result, justice to all irrespective of creed or country’, were the ‘grand bases upon which statesmen should and would be compelled to govern – and no more able or devoted advocate could be engaged in this great object than C. Gavan Duffy,’ Dalley told one meeting. ‘His previous career was one dignified by sacrifice, toil and labours that would have won in a free country the highest guerdon a grateful people could confer. Providence had transferred his glorious and ennobling talents to a more genial clime, where they will flourish, and create new sources of human happiness…’⁸ Many articles about Dalley quote Thomas Shine’s observation that he was never happier than when ‘wreathing the flowers of his graceful fancy round some person, or fact…’⁹ This was an early example.

Admitting Dalley as a barrister was one of the first items of business for the Supreme Court on Saturday 5 July 1856, and briefs soon came his way. Cases in August 1856 included the successful defence of a young man charged with stealing a watch and appearances with senior barristers in tenancy and slander actions.¹⁰ He reportedly caused much merriment in later years when reminiscing about how his audacious approach to advocacy in his early days at the Bar masked meagre legal knowledge.¹¹ The sociable Dalley also recalled spending the first £20 he earned as a barrister giving a dinner that cost £25.¹²

Probably his first entry into the political fray was in support of Charles Cowper and a colleague, Robert Campbell, at an election meeting at Sydney’s Royal Hotel on 29 August. Others on the platform included Deniehy (visiting Sydney from Goulburn), the barrister Edward Butler, and Henry Parkes. In the face of concerted obstruction of its legislative program, Premier Donaldson’s five-man government had resigned four days earlier in favour of Cowper’s team. Campbell was his Treasurer. Under the rules of the day, newly appointed ministers had to go to the polls again to confirm their places in the Assembly.

According to Parkes’s Empire, Dalley was ‘very favourably received’ when he rose to speak. He began with hyperbole, contending that ‘the character of his native country was at stake’ in the re-elections. Nothing, he said, would tend more to lower England’s estimation of the colony than an impression that only five men could be found who were capable of ministerial office. Explaining his involvement in the campaign, he said strong objection could be taken on the grounds of his youth and inexperience, but he felt ‘as deep an interest in his native country as any man breathing’. His conclusion, urging a united effort in the liberal cause, was loudly cheered (in the event, Cowper and Campbell were elected unopposed).¹³

Cowper’s most controversial ministerial appointment was James Martin as Attorney-General. Born in Ireland but raised from infancy in the colony, this highly intelligent and ambitious 36-year-old solicitor had many achievements under his belt. As an outspoken journalist he had edited the daily Australian and weekly Atlas newspapers. He had been a member of the pre-responsible-government Legislative Council, and of the Council committee that drafted the colony’s new constitution. However, his generally conservative political views made him an odd choice for Cowper’s team. And he was not yet a barrister, a situation that in the eyes of most members of the profession disqualified him from the Attorney-General’s job.

His appointment – after senior barristers approached by Cowper had refused the post – sparked an outcry. Seventeen members of the Bar signed a petition objecting to it as a violation ‘of the usages of the constitution, and of the rights and privileges of the Bar.’ Dalley was one of only two barristers then in practice who did not sign.¹⁴ He had told the Cowper/Campbell re-election meeting he believed Martin would prove himself ‘thoroughly qualified for the office of Attorney-General notwithstanding the prejudice which appeared to prevail against him’.¹⁵

The petition was presented to the Governor on 8 September. Three days later, having passed the necessary examinations, Martin was admitted to the Bar. Afterwards, reported the Herald, he received, ‘as is customary on such occasions, the individual congratulations of his professional brethren…’¹⁶ Martin’s biographer, J.M. Bennett, notes that the petitioning barristers knew his admission was imminent, and that therefore their protest was unlikely to unseat him as Attorney-General. This being the case, ‘the ingredients of personality and jealousy, hidden behind the formal terms of the petition, become obvious’.¹⁷

Nevertheless, the conservative forces in the Assembly had regrouped sufficiently to carry a vote of no confidence in the government. After days of rancorous debate, a close division – 26 to 23 – sealed the fate of Cowper’s first administration. The Premier advised the Governor to call fresh elections, arguing that the make-up of the Assembly made strong government impossible. Denison refused, ushering in the Parker government, which took office, with Donaldson as Treasurer, on 3 October.

The political turmoil aroused passions in Sydney, whose population – city and suburbs – was now approaching 70,000.¹⁸ An estimated 4–5,000 crowded into the Prince of Wales Theatre on the evening of 29 September for a meeting called to support the Cowper ministry, defeated but still in office. Dalley was among the speakers, moving a resolution objecting to highly ‘factious and unconstitutional’ behaviour by the government’s opponents. The speakers struggled to be heard. According to the Empire,

In the pit and other parts of the house about a hundred persons were distributed whose object evidently was to upset the proceedings; which, we are sorry to add, they succeeded in effecting. At one period of the meeting the gentlemen on the platform were placed in imminent danger, owing to a ‘rush’ from the pit by a number of obstructionists. The result was that the more pacific gave way, but in their retreat, they were assailed and driven violently against the scenery and standing appointments of the stage, portions of which were materially damaged. Several blows were struck…¹⁹

The following evening, supporters of Parker held a meeting in the Victoria Theatre, which attracted a crowd of about 2,500. At least half were ‘decidedly opposed to the objects of the meeting’, the Empire reported. There was ‘scarcely a moment’s interval to the howling, hooting, yelling, hissing and other demonstrations of opposition, so that scarcely a syllable was heard of any of the speeches’. At one point, fisticuffs broke out on the stage.²⁰

Presumably enjoying the political excitement, Dalley travelled to Parramatta a week later with Martin and other supporters of Cowper in the Assembly. Premier Parker was one of the two members for Parramatta; the visitors’ object was to block his re-election by soliciting support for the liberal standing against him. This was William Byrnes, a Parramatta storeowner and manufacturer – and son-in-law of Francis Oakes, the man Dalley’s father was assigned to when he arrived as a convict in 1818. According to the Empire, Dalley’s ‘lengthened and able’ speech drew ‘repeated plaudits’.²¹ Speaking in Parramatta again three days later, he said Wentworth’s attempt to establish a ‘legal aristocracy’ had been folly, but it ‘would be nothing to the tyranny attempted to be established by the would-be aristocrats of the Donaldson party’. He rejected ‘insinuations’ that Byrnes was anti-Irish. If he thought that was the case he could not support him; the Irish had been ‘missionaries of liberal opinions to the world’.²²

Parker won the election by just twenty votes. Donaldson had less luck, losing his Sydney Hamlets seat to John Campbell, brother of Cowper’s Treasurer (they were sons of the pioneer wharf owner and merchant Robert Campbell). Dalley involved himself in this contest too. Unless young men ‘came forward to take a part in the public affairs of their native land, we should have no chance of progression in this country’, he claimed amid cheers at an election meeting. At Campbell’s victory celebration, he said voters had punished the conservatives for ‘ruthlessly’ assailing the Cowper ministry before it could introduce any measures. Referring to their treatment of Martin, he said night after night they had ‘lifted their intellectual tomahawks against one young man who by his personal industry – by his unaided genius – made his way to the position he held in the house – to the position he now holds in society. (Loud cheers)’ Another seat was found for Donaldson, who continued as Treasurer.

Shortly before Christmas Henry Parkes, on the brink of bankruptcy because of losses by the Empire newspaper, resigned from parliament. Who should take his place? Parkes recommended Dalley, the Empire advising that he

has grown already popular with all classes of the people, not so much on account of his promising abilities, as for his high, generous spirit, and his thorough manliness of character. He is a genuine liberal in his political opinions, and is a fluent and attractive speaker. Young Australia will be gallantly represented in Mr Dalley, while the immigrant portion of the constituency will possess in his progressive mind and liberal education a not unworthy type of their national character, and no mean defence of the general interests.²³

A public meeting at the Exchange Hotel, chaired by a 41-year-old bookseller and MP, William Piddington, considered the merits of Dalley and two other potential candidates, and opted for Dalley despite being told he was resolved not to stand. It decided there was no need to consult the young man – whose electioneering apparently had made quite an impression – before putting his name forward. The speaker who proposed this was sure Dalley would be elected; then it would be up to him ‘to take his seat or to decline to represent the city’.²⁴ Dalley was swayed. In his message to the electors in the newspapers, he said he had been ‘induced to forego my recently expressed determination of not entering upon the present contest’ by the meeting’s unanimous requisition. He had not envisaged seeking a seat in parliament ‘for some time to come’, but promised to be a diligent member if elected.²⁵

While Dalley had the support of the Empire, his opponent, John Fairfax, naturally had the strong backing of the paper he owned, the much more prosperous Sydney Morning Herald. Two years earlier the Herald had castigated Parkes for standing for the Legislative Council; running a newspaper was too demanding an occupation to allow time for other pursuits, and it would be undesirable for a newspaper owner to be in a position where he might be tempted to falsify the record of his own speeches!²⁶ Memories can be short in politics and the press.

Dalley’s campaign got off to a lively start with a public meeting at the Exchange Hotel, in Margaret Street in the city centre. This began indoors, but then the crowd grew too large to be accommodated so they moved outside and the speakers addressed them from an upstairs window. Martin gave a long speech in praise of Dalley, saying that, despite his youth, he surpassed Fairfax in the essential qualifications for election – education, knowledge and general ability, and, above all, independence. There used to be ‘very little independence’ in the colony, he said in an interesting passage on class relations. It had been ‘one vast gaol’ whose keepers, ‘the Macarthurs and others’,

were considered men of dignity and importance; and unfortunately the natives of that day who did not belong to the Macarthur class were taught to look up to them. The very schoolmasters told their scholars when they met those men they were to lift their hats to them, and bow and scrape to them; and the servile feelings that were thus bred in the native-born of that period have grown up with them… These are not the sort of men that ought to be sent into the Legislature; but the independent natives…who have obtained their education at college and at school, who have…imbibed a spirit of independence, and who will carry it into practice in the business of life… [It] is because I believe Mr Dalley to be one of these that I now appear to support him…

Dalley, now a seasoned political campaigner, gave a long response, frequently punctuated by cheers. After repeating that he had been drawn into the contest reluctantly, he praised Parkes as one whose every act had emanated from ‘the highest convictions, and the most ardent desire to benefit the country’. Then he turned to policy. He promised to seek to ‘jealously guard the issue of every shilling from the public Treasury’. On occupation of the land, he said, ‘We have an estate given us by the Creator for the express purpose of planting down upon it the millions and tens of millions who cannot, in other countries, earn the commonest necessaries of life.’ Becoming slightly more specific, he said he favoured settling poorer people on the land but without doing any injustice to those currently in possession.

On the contentious question of primary education, he thought that, because the country was vast and the population scattered, only a national system was practicable. He would like to see one that, while universal, would permit ‘the religious principle to come into operation’ and ‘would conciliate the heads of the various religious bodies’. His view was contrary to the Catholic church’s position (favouring denominational schools), as was his support for phasing out the financial support for priests and ministers introduced by Governor Bourke, which he regretted discriminated against Jews.

He thought duty on sugar and tea should be lowered – because their main consumers were the labouring classes and a smaller tax take would encourage tea drinking and thus aid the temperance cause. He supported the spread of municipal government, and the development of railways. He wanted the electoral law changed to redress the city/country imbalance, and he would support voting by secret ballot ‘if it can be made apparent to me that there is any class of people in this community who require protection in the exercise of the franchise’.

hustings

The Hyde Park hustings in 1874

At midday on a wet and blustery Monday 29 December, around 1,500 people (according to the Empire; the Herald’s estimate was seven to